Friday, 19 April 2013

'Just
a New York conversation / Rattlin' through my mind.'

-
Lou Reed, 'New York Telephone Conversation', Transformer
(1975)

'Bless you.'

- Bryant
Park, Saturday afternoon

'Bless
you,' said the woman sat on one of the metal chairs scattered around
Bryant Park, reading the Saturday papers and wearing a pair of
oversized sunglasses to shield her eyes from the warm April sun. My
wife had just sneezed, and the woman had looked up from her paper as
we walked past, smiled and said 'bless you'. In uttering those two
words, New York City, where we'd arrived a couple of hours before,
seemed suddenly less oppressive, more friendly somehow.

'I
should go to a museum, a gallery or something,
I know; but when you live in New York, when it rains you just stay
indoors and, I don't know, do the cleaning
or something.'

- Rock Center Café, Saturday evening

We
were sat in the Rock Center Café, watching a mix of flamboyant
wannabes and hopeless amateurs skating on the ice rink at Rockefeller
Center, on the rink's last day until next winter. At one point the
ice was cleared and a guy proposed to his fiancee; we have to assume
she said yes. Everyone clapped.

After
a dinner of crab cakes and seasonal vegetables, the girls went out
with Mrs S to watch the skating, where a guy looking like Che Guevara
was impressing and irritating the other skaters by turns with some
quirky dancing. Paying the bill, I got chatting to the waiter, a big,
cuddly sort of a guy with a friendly demeanour, no trace of
snootiness in spite of the WASPy clientele at other tables. I
explained we'd just arrived in New York from two weeks in Orlando. He
told me he used to work at Disney World. I wasn't terribly surprised
to hear that.

In
exchange for his tip, I asked him if he could recommend anywhere in
New York to take children. In response, he proudly reeled off a whole
list of places and then took me over to a waitress, herself a mother
to a son, who offered up some more places - the American Museum Of
Natural History is the only one that springs to mind now - and the
guy wrote some of them down on the back of a receipt. All of the
places were already on our list of things we wanted to see or do
while we were in the city, but it was the easy conversation and
friendliness that made that post-dinner chat memorable.

'You
wan' lox-cream cheese or lox AND cream cheese?'

- Cafe Europa, W33 Street

- Pergola, W40 Street

- Montague Street Bagels, Montague Street, Brooklyn

- Ess-A-Bagel, Third Avenue

Never
ask for salmon. Well, not unless you want the server to give you a
stern, uncomprehending stare and the brusque question above.

We
ate bagels a few times while in New York. You have to really, and
it's hard to go wrong. The best bagels we had? They were from
Montague Street Bagels over in Brooklyn, eaten on a bench on the
pretty esplanade overlooking Manhattan's Financial District, watching
bankers, sundry execs and tourists taking helicopters from a helipad at the
island's southern tip. On the night before we flew home, Daughter 2
and I cut across town to Ess-A-Bagel, a deli over on Third Avenue, whose
bagels are highly recommended by locals. It turns out that they
weren't a patch on Montague Street in Brooklyn, and we managed to
lose Mrs S and Daughter 2 when we tried to regroup, instilling a
momentary panic given that Manhattan suddenly felt very large indeed.

'Do
you like poetry?'

- John's, W44 Street

We
were in John's Pizzeria near Times Square, ordering a take-out pizza
after a trip to a cinema on W42 Street. It was late and the kids
wanted to be in bed, but we were hungry and John's was just around
the corner from the hotel. This used to be the Midtown branch of the gruff Village location but is now totally separate. Mrs S and I had been to John's on Bleecker Street before the kids were born, so we had high hopes for the pizza here.

'Do
you like poetry?' asked the young guy at the booth who took our
takeaway order. By this time Mrs S and the girls were sat down on a
banquette, waiting, and I was looking at the restaurant's business
card, half-wondering why I pick these things up. The question caught
me off guard and I didn't quite know if he was talking to me.

'Sure,'
I responded. 'Sometimes.'

'I
write poetry. I wrote a poem earlier. Could I read it to you?'

When
I agreed, thinking how wonderfully odd this was, he read a short poem
written on a scrap of paper, called 'Norway', which he'd been
inspired to write after serving a young couple from that country
about an hour before. After he'd finished, he meticulously explained
what each line meant. I forget the message now, but it lead him on to
tell me how committed he was to his studies and his academic
endeavours. He gestured at the rest of the wait staff, telling me
that they were all wannabe actors or performers, that he thought it
was all fake and that few people wanted to make something of
themselves through hard work and commitment. I wished him well, told
him that being able to write was a gift, gave him my email address
after encouraging him to seek a publisher, and left, thinking how
typically New York it was to have that conversation.

'Children
are people too!'

- Sixth Avenue

In
a city of eight million people, seeing the same person twice is weird, let
alone statistically mind-bending.

This
utterance was hurled at us twice from a talkative black homeless guy
on Sixth Avenue on a corner somewhere between Central Park and Radio
City, in response to the four of us striding along the sidewalk. The
second time he said it, toward the end of our stay, I turned back and
offered him a smile. He returned my smile with a massive grin, a wink
and a gentle shake of the polysterene coffee cup filled with quarters
he was holding.

'It's
good to still be here.'

- Other Music, E4 Street

That's
what the dude behind the counter in Other Music said to me when I
said how pleased I was that this East Village institution was still
there. In the days before writing this section we've learned that
independent record store Bleecker Bob's in Greenwich had closed its doors forever. Indie record shops in cities across the
globe are shutting down as the influence of downloads and retailers
like Amazon deliver a more instant response to our music-consuming
needs. At least in 2012, Other Music was still there. I truly hope
they'll still be there when we return to New York this year.

We'd
walked into Other Music after I took Daughter 1 into the John
Varvartos store on the Bowery. That trendy outlet is the site of the old
CBGB venue. I wanted to take her there for several reasons, one being
that she loves my CBGB t-shirt, and another being that from an early
age I've been conditioning her to New York punk via Talking Heads,
Blondie and others. I have some great video footage of her
headbanging along to the first Ramones album, and Television's Marquee
Moon was, for a while, her favourite album in her iPod. The former
CBGBs was a curiously soulless place, the barest trace of the bastion
of New York's music scene to be found in the exposed brickwork, no
dirt or grit or energy among the racks of trendy clothes. Another
reason for nipping in here was because of a well-publicised display
of vintage vinyl. Considering the former venue was the revolution
against bloated Seventies rock, seeing loads of LPs by godawful bands
that the NY punk scene deliberately rejected was thoroughly
dispiriting. As was the burly security guard breathing down our
necks.

So
Other Music was like a welcome relief when we walked in. I
specifically wanted to buy Hurry Up, We're Dreaming by
M83. Being far too untrendy to know my way round the modern musical
maze of stratified sub-genres, I asked someone stacking new releases
onto the shelves to point me in the right direction and she was
really friendly and helpful, something you'll never get when shopping
on Amazon.

'Do
you need some directions?'

- Bleecker Street

We
weren't especially lost, that was the thing. We'd been walking round
Greenwich Village for most of the morning and had been enjoying
exploring the wonky streets and haunts of Beats and other cool people
from the Fifties and Sixties, looking for houses once lived in by
Dustin Hoffmann and Bob Dylan, looking down the road pictured on the
sleeve of Dylan's The Freewheelin Bob Dylan, drinking excellent
cappuccinos in Caffe Reggio and watching people playing chess in
Washington Square Park. A friendly man, with shopping bags and a
beaming smile saw us meandering down Bleecker past the red canopy of
the Village Vanguard, the important jazz venue that witnessed many an
important gig in jazz's heyday, and he assumed we were struggling to
navigate the complexity of the streets compared to the rest of
Manhattan. He's clearly never been to London.

That
said, it is a little confusing in the Village, and he seemed so keen,
and almost proud, to help that we didn't want to say no. At that
point we were on our way to the original Magnolia Bakery to buy
lavish cupcakes that would later be consumed on the High Line in the
shadow of the Standard hotel. He gestured down the street, gave us
the directions and he then walked off, smiling and evidently pleased
to have assisted some tourists trying really hard not to look like
tourists. An elderly lady in Brooklyn on Montague Street had also
gone out of her way to see if we needed directions while trying to
find the bagel shop, whereas earlier that day when we gingerly
approached two traffic cops to ask for directions on how to get onto
the Brooklyn Bridge they were smilingly obliging, which was a relief
of sorts. I thought they were going to arrest me for being so lost.

'It's
our best selling item.'

- A Salt And Battery, Greenwich Avenue

Immediately
before bumping into the helpful shopper by the Vanguard, we went for lunch at one of the
most baffling places we've come across in New York - A Salt And
Battery, an authentic fish and chip shop in the Village,
owned and staffed by English people. Sitting in the window eating
sustainable white fish and chips from little baskets while looking
out onto the quiet streets, and hearing the steady stream of English
and Irish accents of queuing customers, it felt like being back home
perhaps, even though we don't normally go to the chippy very often.

Talking
to the guy behind the counter, a warm guy that I swore was a dead
ringer for Jack Whitehall, I alighted upon a poster advertising that
deep-fried Cadbury Cream Eggs were back in stock. He explained that
it was the most popular thing on the menu, which I was slightly
aghast at. I took a photo of the poster and emailed it to a friend in
Edinburgh, the message saying that I thought he'd be really proud to
see Scottish cuisine making it to New York.

'Well,
because you asked so politely... I love the English accent!''

'Do
you like Only Fools And Horses?'

- Tony's di Napoli, W43 Street

We
had decided to go back to Tony's di Napoli just off Times Square,
regarded as one of the best family-run Italian restaurants in the
city. We'd been there on the Saturday, and with no other plans for
dinner, and it having been a massive hit with the girls (and us), we
decided to go back. Previously we'd booked, but this time we were
going in on spec, and having seen the hard-faced hostess
brusquely managing the pre-theatre crowd a few days before, I was a
little nervous. I needn't have worried, but in being a little
apprehensive I enquired of the (different) hostess with a bit more
pronounced politeness (remember 'please' and 'thank you' are not
common currencies in NYC) as to whether we could have a table of four
and despite being every bit as stern-looking as her colleague, her
face suddenly lit up and she became really friendly. Perhaps I'm a
little too conscious and embarrassed by my Englishness sometimes, and
I clearly forget that people like to hear the accent when you're
abroad, especially in the US.

The
appeal of our accents seemed to prevail as we were taken to our table
downstairs. After ordering drinks, including a fantastic Negroni for
me, our waiter took over the table. I can't remember what he looked
like now, but in my mind he reminds me of a blend of Adam Buxton and
Carrie's writer boyfriend Jack Berger in Sex And The City. Asking us
if we liked Only Fools And Horses in a Brooklyn accent was singularly
one of the most unexpected things we heard in New York. It turned out
his mother was English and so he'd been raised watching the sitcom,
but even if that was an entirely logical question for him to ask, it
was still pretty crazy to us. We all enjoyed our pasta and it's no
surprise that we'll be going back there again in May; we won't, on
the other hand, be going back to Carmine's on the Upper West Side,
which we went to on our last day, and which was nowhere near as nice.

'Are
you going to American Girl?'

- American Girl, Fifth Avenue

'Are you going to American Girl?' asked a former work colleague when
we popped into our firm's New York office to say hello. The question
was aimed at Daughter 1 and 2, who had been a bit grumpy and unruly
for most of the afternoon. It was our last day, we'd been away for
the best part of three weeks, and the week of walking around New York
was beginning to take its toll. A few minutes before, we'd gone
through the usual parental cycle of warnings that if they misbehaved
we'd have to take away the thing they'd been innocently looking
forward to most about New York; that thing was a trip to the American
Girl store on Fifth Avenue, and we'd been talking about it for
months.

So
the question left us in a tricky position, since they seemed to
take the enquiry as somehow meaning that, despite our warnings, the
nice lady had given them permission to go. And of course we
acquiesced, looked terribly inconsistent, and roughly three hours
later we walked out of American Girl carrying two dolls and a couple of
outfits with two very smug and satisfied young children. The dolls
were promptly christened Lily and Jessica, or Mortgage #1 and
Mortgage #2 as I call them. Another father in the queue and I shared
our amazement at the audacious cost, but handed over our credit cards
anyway. When the girls feel like it, they dress them and brush Lily
and Jessica's hair lovingly. When they don't we tell them they're bad
parents and that the dolls should be put up for adoption.